An organised crime gang of the near future?
Photo: Jennifer Soo
Technology such as cloned part-robot humans used by organised crime gangs pose the greatest future challenge to police, along with online scamming, Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Mick Keelty says.
Mr Keelty said the police force would have to use experts from the private sector to fight tech-savvy organised criminals, because it lacked the necessary skills.
Technology-enabled crime was "a new area that's growing exponentially", he warned yesterday.
A feature of serious organised criminal networks was their ability to be flexible and quickly adopt new techniques, and police forces would have to move quickly to keep up.
"And I think a lot of those skills don't exist in policing today," Mr Keelty told a parliamentary inquiry into the future impact of organised crime in Canberra.
"A lot of those skills will have to be imported into policing and probably exist more so in the private sector."
Mr Keelty said it was hard to estimate how much money the AFP would need to combat technology-based crime.
But he identified the use of robotics and cloning as future challenges.
"Our environmental scanning tells us that even with some of the cloning of human beings - not necessarily in Australia but in those countries that are going to allow it - you could have potentially a cloned part-person, part-robot," he said.
"You could (also) have technology acting at the direction of a human being, but the human being being distanced considerably from the actual crime scene."
Mr Keelty said scams had sprung up in online virtual worlds such as Second Life, where people can spend real money via credit cards to buy products such as virtual real estate and gifts.
"Policing that is going to be quite difficult," he said.
Australian and UK police had also noticed a trend of internet pedophiles crossing into real life pedophilia, and were planning a joint operation in developing countries, he said.
"We are watching people in the virtual world convert what they are doing in the virtual world to travel to some of these countries where children are at risk," he said.
"So this convergence from the virtual to the real world is a new phenomenon and makes evidence-gathering quite difficult. It will be a problem for us into the future."
AFP deputy commissioner John Lawler said maintaining strong links with foreign police forces and attorney-general's departments would help authorities gather evidence needed to track global criminals moving through cyberspace.
Criminals could use technology to commit crime but also to improve their ability to communicate secretly, he said.
